ハルちゃんマジ天使

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12 Days IX: WHAT IS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND BUT IT’S AWESOME

That’s a line that one of the characters say that is the essence of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer.

The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer combines the ‘what are you doing with your life?’ of Solanin with the FJDKLSA;FSAJ; AWESOME of Gurren Lagann. It’s about a disaffected university student who’s suddenly called upon by his newfound lizard familiar to help save the earth as a knight from a literal floating hammer in space that’s ready to crack the earth in half. Being the typical university student, he goes on and doesn’t give a crap.

And where there are knights, there’s a princess. This princess is a high school girl who’s dying, but is healthy until she saves the earth. She really likes the earth. She likes it so much that she won’t let anyone else destroy it. Or have it. So she decides she’s going to destroy the earth herself after she saves it. By punching it, which is her special power. This is what convinces our main character to get in on the adventure, because he doesn’t particularly like the earth that much either. So he ends up joining the princess in her clandestine scheme.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this manga. The animal familiars are pretty great because they’re just random animals. They don’t really have any special powers beyond talking and being tethered to their knight. There’s no real pattern to them, they’re just random animals. There’s a chicken. There’s a grasshopper. There’s a horse. It’s funny to see a horse talk about serious stuff.

The fights are a lot like FMA. Each knight really has one particular power that they end up honing over the course of the series. A lot of the fights involve using their powers in a lot of clever ways and a lot of punching. The big bad uses golems to fight the knights and those golems are usually destroyed by a well placed punch.

But one of the most enjoyable things was watching Yuuhi grow from being uninterested and apathetic to getting really into his role. Even when he says he’ll help Sami, he pretty much drags his feet around and remains as detached as he can. But he slowly builds up his powers and determination and eventually becomes Sami’s right hand man and acts as a knight would, genuflecting before Sami, standing tall before the other knights, and punching the hell out of golems.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a giant crack down the middle, caused by either a space hammer or a girl’s punch.